Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

Bit snide how they put the prices up really making it effectively the same price as it was before! Will wait and see if they put the prices of these down a bit towards the end of the month. I'm sure my brother picked his up for about £180ish and got the £100 cashback meaning it only cost him £80 or so.
 
£97.94 from ServersPlus inc the 3 year on site warranty from HP too!

Or the same price without the 3yrs warranty!

£166 cash back

MSFREENDUK For free delivery
 
hartgeh3 said:
£97.94 from ServersPlus inc the 3 year on site warranty from HP too!

Or the same price without the 3yrs warranty!

£166 cash back

MSFREENDUK For free delivery
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..think they upped the price now, still the same for one with std warranty.

Mine arrives tomorrow .. still torn between XPenology and FreeNAS. Like the look of XP and ease of use but concerned about running an unsupported platform for backing up data.

Opinions?
 
adam_m said:
..think they upped the price now, still the same for one with std warranty.

Mine arrives tomorrow .. still torn between XPenology and FreeNAS. Like the look of XP and ease of use but concerned about running an unsupported platform for backing up data.

Opinions?
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I tried FreeNAS for a bit... it was pretty nice and performed well, but I also tried out and preferred UnRAID in the end
 
uncle_rufus said:
I tried FreeNAS for a bit... it was pretty nice and performed well, but I also tried out and preferred UnRAID in the end
Click to expand...

..does it have a Plex media server plugin?

Top priorities are:

- Plex server capable
- Reliable data integrity (using RAID5 right now in my ReadyNAS and besides being deathly slow it's been solid)
- Fast file server

..lower ones are:
- Time machine capable .. can put a HDD in the back of the Airport express so not as fussed about that one to be honest

..looking at using Windows8 with something like stable bit at the moment too - so many choices!!
 
I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me as it's quite popular as a media server OS...

It uses a sort of psuedo software RAID4 solution - which is pretty much RAID5 but without any striping (similar to Stablebit) and so all the parity info lives on a single drive (which must be at least as large as the next largest), and the remainder of the array works similarly to JBOD (i.e. any individual file exists entirely on one physical disk). Means you have "proper" redundancy of 1 drive, and if more than 1 drive goes you only lose whatever files happened to be on the failed drives (there are settings that allow you to control how the OS distributes your files across the drives to keep things more tightly or loosely separated - like if you want all your music to be on one physical drive, or if you don't mind each artist or each album living on separate drives). It still then presents the files in one logical set of "shares" that obfuscates the fact that technically they aren't on the same disk.

You can expand the array at any time by just adding a new disk (so long as it isn't larger than the existing parity disk). This is different to FreeNAS or other RAID5 solutions where you can't easily grow the existing array to add more capacity.
 
..could be a contender.

Being a massive Mac lover I'm amazed I'm even contemplating Windows 8 as the foundation of my home media experience but there's something pulling me that way - safety in numbers I guess :-)
 
I'm sure thats what Synology's hybrid raid offers, I was reading up on it and from what I gather you can setup an array, and then expand it providing you have at least 3 drives in the array already
 
adam_m said:
..could be a contender.

Being a massive Mac lover I'm amazed I'm even contemplating Windows 8 as the foundation of my home media experience but there's something pulling me that way - safety in numbers I guess :-)
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You would need W8 Pro running on the server if you wish to connect to it via remote desktop though.

Had a play with XPEnology on my old N36L and was suprised by how slick it is considering it an un-official port and uses very few system resources. And i much prefer the interface over Freenas.
 
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Not on a microservers but I've just ditched freenas and zfs and favour of debian and mdadm as the network performance of freenas ware dire under esxi. 500Mbps FreeNAS vs 900 Mbps Debian.
 
if i were to install ESXi to a USB drive in-order to use the Vsphere hypervisor, would I still be able to setup RAID5 on my 4x 2Tb drives? I'm reading that Vsphere is picky with what RAID's it will see and want to ensure I go about it all correctly.
 
.temp said:
if i were to install ESXi to a USB drive in-order to use the Vsphere hypervisor, would I still be able to setup RAID5 on my 4x 2Tb drives?
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Yes, the place you install ESXi has nothing to do with how you can setup a RAID array.

You just have to make sure that any RAID card you buy is on the compatibility list on the VMWare website.
Generally, the cheaper RAID cards will only support RAID 0 or 1. For RAID 5 or 6 you'll need a card with Battery Backed Write Cache (BBWC) or Flash Backed Write Cache (FBWC) and these are generally pricier.
 
Little_Crow said:
Yes, the place you install ESXi has nothing to do with how you can setup a RAID array.

You just have to make sure that any RAID card you buy is on the compatibility list on the VMWare website.
Generally, the cheaper RAID cards will only support RAID 0 or 1. For RAID 5 or 6 you'll need a card with Battery Backed Write Cache (BBWC) or Flash Backed Write Cache (FBWC) and these are generally pricier.
Click to expand...

What about software RAID5?
 
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